Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

Are you feeling a little overzealous about your use of keywords? If you have the nagging worry that you just might have used your chosen keywords a few too many times on your webpage, chances are good that your probably you did.

But how too many is really too many when it comes to search engine optimization? Well, you’d probably be surprised. There are plenty of “thou shall nots” that webmasters seem to break constantly, simply because they don’t realize that keyword spamming is an actual penalty that will cause their site to get booted right out of the Google index. Here are some of the things you can check and do to ensure your on-page keywords don’t trip the spam filter and are working most effectively for your site’s optimization.

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You know the tools, the ones that the uninformed… or barely informed… take as gospel when it comes to search engine optimization. These tools in the hands of your client… or worse, a really bad SEO who is trying to steal a client… can be a deadly thing. And worse, because they used to be useful once upon a time, most of these tools are the ones that people have heard of.

Is your client measuring your success on how much the site’s Alexa ranking goes up or down? Or using an automated rank checker program, ala Web Position Gold, to check the Google positioning for his top fifty chosen keywords every hour on the hour? Here are the tools and programs that can be oh-so-dangerous in the hands of the SEO uneducated.

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When you create the content on your landing page, it is important to consider not only the elements that go into your landing page design, but also consider the things that should be avoided. Yet time after time I come across landing pages – some which advertisers are paying premium prices per click to send traffic to – that seem to break many of the landing page rules and very likely result in a high loss of potential conversions.

So what are the things that should and shouldn’t be included on a landing page? Here are some tips on creating and maintaining a high converting landing page for both organic and paid search results. And as an added bonus, some of these also help with your AdWords quality score if you are having issues with it.

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You know those little favicons, where people try and make something resembling their logo appear in a teeny, tiny 16×16 pixel image. They show up in the navigation bar of many browsers and also appear in browser bookmarks or favorites (hence the name favicons which was shortened from favorites icon). But while they definitely have the coolness factor, especially if you manage to capture your site’s look successfully in the favicon, does your site really need to incorporate one? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

A few years ago, favicons were only seen on a handful of sites, either super geeky ones or big brand ones. But since then, favicons have been becoming more mainstream and much more common to see. So while they have been gaining popularity, some savvy marketers are using them for branding as well as to encourage repeat visitors. But how, you might ask?

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When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. And what’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search results for. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords.

So what exactly do these “variations” refer to? It definitely goes far beyond the typical misspellings, which is what most people think of when considering alternative keywords. And while misspellings are a crucial part of your keyword variations, there are more areas to look at. Here is what they are and how you can use them to your advantage when creating keyword lists.

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We have all heard everyone say that quality inbound links are crucial to any search engine optimization campaign. But that said, what exactly qualifies as a quality link? Is it just a link from a PR6 site or higher? Is it a link from a site that ranks for your chosen keywords? Is it a site that sells links through a text link broker? You would probably be surprised that the answer can be yes or no, but it is up to you to identify what makes a quality link and one makes a link you’d be better off passing on.

There are many factors that can go into identifying what makes a quality link from a site. Let’s look at some of the things that makes a link a quality link and how to know if there are potential buyer-beware issues for each.

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A couple of years ago, using meta tags definitely fell out of style. They went from being near the top of every search engine optimiser’s to do list to being dropped right off the bottom and added to a site more as an afterthought than a SEO technique. True, they stopped being the sure-fire SEO technique they were several years ago, but should they really have been relegated to non-existence? Definitely not.

Even today, however, marketers are confused about what meta tags are actually good for, especially with so many people saying meta tags are useless and not to add them. But then add to that the fact that Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have stepped up to add new meta tags into the mix in the past year to allow webmasters to customize how their sites are displayed in the search results. So here is what meta tags are still useful for in 2007, and why you should be using them.

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At Seodays, we talked about keyword density and how important keyword density is when optimizing your content. However, not everyone understands how keyword density works… and how going overboard with keyword density can sink your entire page to the bottom of the search engine results, if it even ranks at all.

Keyword density is a tricky one because the percentage you should have can vary depending on the market area. In a non-competitive area, you don’t need to worry much about it too other than to make sure those keywords are on the page, preferably in the first half of the content rather than the second half. But if you are in a competitive area, you need to hit certain percentages of keyword density, and placing them at specific places within your content, without crossing that invisible line where your content becomes so keyword heavy that it becomes spammy.

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Whether you love it or hate it, link bait has been going strong for about a year now, with webmasters and bloggers carefully crafting titles and articles for the maximum amount of link baiting goodness. But like all SEO techniques that webmasters run wild with until it is done to death, is link bait due to be exterminated as a usable technique?

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How many times have you seen a hot looking navigation structure, only to discover it is practically useless when you tried to actually use it? Or when you are trying to find a site in the search results, but the site’s entire Google snippet consists of nothing but the list of categories taken from the site’s navigation?

When designing a site’s navigation structure, it is one area where it is crucial to carefully balance the needs of usability with the needs of search engine optimization. And unfortunately, it is one area that non-SEO web designers tend to excel on one or the other, but rarely both. There are several things you need to consider when designing your site’s navigation structure, so that you don’t discover problems with it down the road when wondering why your bounce rate is so high or why your pages aren’t being indexed as well as they should.
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